


heart's desire

by outboxed (fallencrest)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-10
Updated: 2014-06-10
Packaged: 2018-02-04 04:32:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1765606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallencrest/pseuds/outboxed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elia's marriage takes away her easy smiles, her happy grace; but she comes alive again under his hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	heart's desire

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://gotexchange-mod.livejournal.com/1067.html?thread=296491#t296491) at the got-exchange fic meme in March 2012.

It is only after she marries Rhaegar that it changes. Oberyn goes to King's Landing and he sees her, all huddled in on herself, her beauty consumed by a subtle kind of misery that no one else seems able to detect. 

She had been beautiful in Dorne, beautiful and young, vivid and alive. They had smiled together, laughed, but all their touches had been innocent. She had been beautiful and she had been destined for someone else, these were things Oberyn understood. He had not wanted to make the marriage more painful or more difficult for either of them. So he'd smiled and laughed and run his fingers through her hair and complimented her but never kissed her lips or caressed her shoulders, her hips, her breasts, the way he might have.

But, after the marriage and the first child and the way Rhaegar Targaryen never even _looked_ at her, things had changed. On the balcony of her private bedchamber, Elia had stood, staring blankly, and Oberyn had stood behind her, too close, and felt the terrible weight of her sadness. 

"You are beautiful," he says, "more beautiful than this place," and he runs his hands over her shoulders as he says, "I do not know how you can bear it." She smiles a little then and it hits him just how much she's changed. In Dorne, she had smiled easily but the only time he'd seen her smile since he'd arrived at the Red Keep had been when she'd first caught sight of him - and that smile had faded soon enough.

Still, she changes under his hands, she leans back into them, her face lights up and she is flooded with natural grace. She becomes herself again, he thinks, when she laughs and pushes him back onto her bed. She kisses him with the kind of abandon she'd had when they'd played foolish, experimental games, before either of them had known what it had meant. And, for a while, when they're together, she becomes the girl she'd been before she'd married. It isn't the same when he sees her attending to her husband, bedecked in all the finery of a queen, and she can barely even muster a smile to return his own at banquets and tourneys; but, when he folds her in his arms or traces patterns on her bare skin, she is Elia of Dorne again.


End file.
